Mac OS 10.1

When I read Garry Barker's interview of Avie Tevanian, Apple's
senior vice president of software engineering, I was intrigued
by Avie's statement that Mac OS 10.1 runs five times faster than
the first build of Mac OS X.

That's big news as far as I'm concerned (if it's true). In my
opinion, there are only two things holding Mac OS X back from
increasing Apple's market share of OS software:
1) Lack of applications, and 2) Speed.

The dearth of applications is only a temporary barrier. For example,
I just tested and published a review of Connectix's Virtual PC for
Mac OS X. It's terrific (but sluggish). Then, talking to O'Reilly
developer Rael Dornfest, who's in contact with Microsoft, I learned
that MS Office 10 is rolling along beautifully. We'll review it as
soon as we have the beta.

Adobe's continued to remain mum about Carbonizing Photoshop, but
they seem to be making good progress toward porting many of their
other applications. Macromedia, on the other hand, is "all over"
Mac OS X. Freehand 10 has been out for months. By MacWorld 2002
in SF, I think we're going to have just about every application
we need to use Apple's new operating system on a daily basis.

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So, speed remains the big question. How long will it take the Apple
engineers to adjust the memory management of Mac OS X (among other
optimizations) to give us an OS that moves at the same speed that
we do while we work? It sounds to me that Mac OS 10.1 might be a
big step in that direction.

Right now I'm recommending Mac OS X to PowerBook owners who have
a FireWire Pismos or one of the new iBooks or TiG4s. I can't wait
for the day when I can recommend Mac OS X to everyone who runs
modern Apple hardware. The release of Mac OS 10.1 will give us a
good idea about how far away that day might be.

Virtual PC Brings Windows to Mac OS X
Connectix has made a daring move by releasing a beta version of
Virtual PC for Mac OS X. They call it Test Drive. Will this become
one of the first killer apps for Apple's new Unix-based OS, or
roadkill before it hits the streets?

Building a Simple Java Application in Mac OS X
The word is getting out that Mac OS X is a terrific development
platform for Java. In this article, Daniel Steinberg shows you the
basic steps needed to develop a simple GUI application.

Virtual PC Brings Windows to Mac OS X
Connectix has made a daring move by releasing a beta version of
Virtual PC for Mac OS X. They call it Test Drive. Will this become
one of the first killer apps for Apple's new Unix-based OS or
roadkill before it hits the streets?

Talk Backs

Maybe I'm missing something here, but what exactly is the big
deal about this "new capability?" You've been able to do this,
and much better, for years now on the various Windows CE/Pocket
PC devices. Is this omission simply because those are not the
properly "blessed" environment of Mac/Palm? Mind you, many of
those MS-infested devices can also run Linux... I find this kind
of selective blindness disconcerting, especially in an article
from a generally reputable technical source (O'Reilly).

The big deal is that this capability is now available on devices
that run Palm OS. This is not an article about competition between
Palms and Pocket PCs. If you already have a Palm OS device, why
should you have to switch to an iPaq just to play a QuickTime movie?
As far as selective blindness goes ... take a look at the context of
the article. It's a QuickTime column running on the Mac DevCenter.
If you're such a Pocket PC fan, what are you doing in the Mac
DevCenter? Pocket PCs don't even support Macs.

We write about Pocket PCs, Linux PDAs, and yes, Palm devices. There's
no blindness around here, I assure you.

I've been using an SMC Barricade since Life After Airport Part I.
(I posted a comment to that article, in fact.) Since then, I've
returned my internal airport card to Fry's, since its range with my
TiBook was so pathetic. I'm now using an Orinoco WaveLan Gold card
under OS X with the open source drivers presently being developed
by Rob McKeever and others (yay!). It's not feature-complete yet,
and it's less convenient to have to use a PC Card, but for me, the
performance increase makes it worthwhile. (Btw, the standard
airport drivers under OS 9 support the WaveLan card.)

I suppose everyone noticed that you can't send an array message
to an NSMutableDictionary class object and have it work? Should
there be an @private directive at the start of the instance variable
declarations in Controller.h to indicate it's a concrete class? Does
ObjC use some other convention to disclose the author's intention
about whether the class is concrete or abstract?

I notice that ObjC programmers tend to declare public accessors
for everything and use messages to self rather than in preference
to assignment. This does make the program flow better, but it also
is a very different attitude than the typical C++ programmer's fetish
for encapsulation. Those guys begrudge every little chink in he
armor around their instance variables. I can hear them looking at
typical ObjC code and sniffing, "with that many accessors it's not
an object, it's just a sruct."

So who is (mostly) right? Is the ObjC style the enemy of scaling
to large projects? Is the C++ style just a knee-jerk?